Great balls of fire, they’ve done it again! Every year around this time – and it’s always on a Sunday — I wake up to find it’s an hour later than I thought. One hour exactly, no more, no less.

Something similar happens in October, when I wake an hour early on what the Lord has infallibly and irrefutably marked off as a day of rest. The Bible is explicit on this point: “And on the seventh day God finished His work which He had done, and He rested on the seventh day from all His work which He had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all His work which He had done in creation.” (Genesis 2:1-3 RSV)

In other words, God needed sleep. And so do we. What profiteth a man to be told in the fall that he’s regained an hour he lost in the spring? When you’re sleeping, nothing gets done. That’s the whole point of it. That’s the Word of God. And whoever’s been fiddling with the clocks all these years had better quit it, pronto.

Sometimes you need to “interpret” the Bible, or “read between the lines,” in order to know what it means. For example, when God says, “Thou shalt not kill,” He makes an exception for wars. Thou shalt kill all you want in a war and No One on High has a problem with that – unless, of course, your enemies think like you do, in which case they’re the armies of Satan and thou shalt “pacify” them with “overwhelming force.”

As with killing, so with stealing, the Eighth Commandment. When God says “Thou shalt not steal,” He’s not talking about CEO’s, televangelists, the health care industry or insider trading – unless you’re Martha Stewart, in which case thou shalt go to jail.

Verily, if you’re Martha Stewart, thou shalt go directly to jail and not collect $200, while Juror No. 4, the lone holdout in the Tyco trial, shall say that Dennis Kozlowski is a “railroaded victim of ethnic scapegoating.” Why shouldn’t Kozlowski spend $2 million on a birthday party for his (second) wife? Why can’t a Polack sock the shareholders for $6,000 shower curtains?

You can tell that the Lord doesn’t mind a little stealing, really, because He puts it way, way down on the list of things thou shalt not do, after worshipping idols, taking His name in vain, dishonoring parents, committing adultery and so forth. All these things are more important than not stealing, which is just slightly more important than not lying and coveting thy neighbor’s wife. Just between us, if you need to skip a couple of Commandments, these are the ones, since you’re short on sleep to start with.

Moving along, the Lord has nothing to say about “gay marriage.” Neither do I, since I regard it as the dumbest issue ever to rend the Temple veil. But never mind: God has lots to say about regular marriage, and most of it isn’t good. Better you shouldn’t marry at all (Matt 19:10, I Cor 7:1, 7:27-28, 7:32-34, 7:38), although marriage “isn’t a sin,” according to Vaughn Roste, a former Lutheran, Episcopalian and Presbyterian factotum who now works and worships in the United Church of Christ.

“I picked up my Bible and looked up all the passages that have anything to do with marriage,” Roste writes in “Biblical Marriage: A Bad Source for Debate.” With a concordance Roste checked every Word he could think of on this subject – “marriage, marriages, marry, marries, married, wedding, weddings, wed, husband, husbands, wife, and wives” – and discovered, among other things:

2) “If a woman cannot be proven to be a virgin at the time of marriage, she shall be stoned” (Deut 22:13-21);

3) “A rapist must marry his victim (Ex. 22:16, Deut. 22:28-29) unless she was already his fiancée, in which case he shall be put to death if he raped her in the country, but both of them killed if he raped her in town” (Deut. 22:23-27);

4) “Women are the property of their fathers until married and their husbands after that” (Ex. 20:17, 22:17, Deut. 22:24, Mat 22:25;

Incidentally, the sin of Sodom (Gen 19:1-38) wasn’t “homosexuality,” as so many believe, but the failure of every Sodomite except Lot to offer hospitality to a couple of strangers who turned out to be angels, and whom all the other Sodomites wanted to rape, even though the angels were male, or anyway sexless, which is what you should be, too. Lot offered the Sodomites his daughters as a booby prize, but they wouldn’t take no for an answer. That’s why the Lord rained fire and brimstone — or “global warming” — on Sodom and Gomorrah.

And that’s why George W. Bush is going to Hell, and why his wholly owned chattel, Laura Bush, will be turned to a pillar of salt if she doesn’t read between the lines and pop him one. Because, starting in October, every foreign visitor to the United States shall be fingerprinted on arrival. And that’s not – no, it’s not – a Christian thing to do.

2 Responses to “Bible Time”

I’ve been thinking that for rather a long time – glad you finally said it (and far more emphatically than I could have). Merchant and Ivory did beautiful films without explicit sex, but very engaging story lines and Wim Wenders also manages quite nicely with love and tenderness instead of nude bodies bouncing around or face-eating kissing scenes. I’m sure there are others. Crude sex is probably easier to do, but it’s boring (or just embarrassing).
Thanks, Peter for your acerbic and pithy commentary, I’ve missed your point of view since you left 7 Days; I’m glad you’re here!